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abstract
Posthumanism can be understood as a position that de-prioritizes or rescinds the privilege of the human in some way – frequently by attempting to think humanity as one element of a wider ecology of interdependent forces. This paper argues that one can be on the side of the human without neglecting the assemblages of which we are all a part – by conceiving of humanity as a site of nascent potential for sapience + care – an alienated understanding of a complex world combined with the will to engage in the reparative processes of tending to it.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Braidotti, The Posthuman 50.
2 Colbrook 65.
3 Such a position is closely aligned with a range of twenty-first-century feminist mat(t)erialisms, several of which have proved influential to xenofeminism – not least Donna Haraway’s later work, to which we will be returning in the course of this discussion.
4 Laboria Cuboniks n. pag.
5 Braidotti, The Posthuman 3.
6 Laboria Cuboniks n. pag.
7 Braidotti, “Posthuman, All Too Human?” n. pag.
8 Steyerl n. pag.
9 Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto” 180.
10 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble 100.
11 Ibid. 55.
12 Ibid.
13 See Colbrook 198.
14 Roden.
15 See, for example, Haraway, When Species Meet.
16 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble 97.
17 Ibid. 40.
18 Braidotti, The Posthuman 195.
19 Levitas 6.
20 Laboria Cuboniks n. pag.
21 Think of the ways in which science fiction has taught us to desire hoverboards and heads-up displays, and extend this beyond mere consumer electronics to the broader field of technosocial reality.
22 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble 11.
23 Ibid. 39.
24 Ibid. 2.
25 Ibid. 78.
26 Haraway, When Species Meet 106.
27 Negarestani, “The Labor of the Inhuman, Part II” n. pag.
28 Cornell and Seely 121.
29 Shotwell 1.
30 Ibid. 98.
31 Puig de la Bellacasa 133.
32 An entitlement, incidentally, that holds only at a certain scale – namely, when held at sufficient distance to apply to an apparently encompassing “us.” When one breaks this category down to the various “us-es” it contains – “us-es” shaped by race, nation, class, and so on – it becomes apparent that species entitlement typically extends only to the most parochial kinds of false universals.
33 Laboria Cuboniks n. pag.
34 Becker 54.
35 Ibid. 54–55.
36 Bauer n. pag.
37 Williams and Srnicek 358.
38 Negarestani, “The Labor of the Inhuman, Part II” n. pag.
39 Ibid. n. pag.
40 See, for example, Peter Wolfendale’s apparent justification of the meat-industrial complex on the basis that non-human animals are incapable of reason. Humans are entitled to slaughter other animals (and warrant “ethical special treatment”) because we make beauty for ourselves in the form of art and, as persons, can be considered as self-created works of art in our own right. Whilst non-human animals can be beautiful, “they are not thereby works of art, either for others or for themselves. Life is cheap. Pies are art” (“Not So Humble Pie” n. pag.).
41 Becker 54.
42 I am indebted to Dominic Fox here, with whom I discussed several of these points.
43 Puig de la Bellacasa 120–21.
44 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble 50.
45 Shotwell 100.
46 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble 60.
47 Shotwell 98.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid. 99.
50 Ibid. 98.
51 Ibid.
52 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble 116.
53 Pirici and Voinea n. pag.
54 Stiegler 115.
55 Puig de la Bellacasa 7.
56 Ibid. 5.
57 Ibid. 85.
58 Ibid. 10.
59 Ibid. 163.
60 Ibid.
61 Becker 50.
62 Wolfendale, Interview with Laureano Ralón n. pag.
63 Puig de la Bellacasa 118.
64 Laboria Cuboniks n. pag.